expansion of the fertilizer industry, acted as a stimulus to related industries through the increase of food distribution for city residents who are net food consumers or people who are engaged with non-agricultural work in rural areas, and may also have eased social tensions by giving easy access to food for the most impoverished peoples who work in the urban informal sectors.
Thus, it can be considered that the Green Revolution has contributed positively to the world food problem and general economy and society of each country.
2. Influence of the Green Revolution on the Rural Society
However, appraisal of the effects of the Green Revolution on the society in rural areas, especially regarding the influence on the income structure and distribution, has been mixed, with some positive and some negative assessments, due to the differences between regional rural conditions and the economic scale of farming.
The first cause of these different appraisals is the technical character of the Green Revolution. In other words, the basic technical premise for the introduction of the Green Revolution is whether or not it has an adequate water supply, or as a bare minimum, that it can expect a certain amount of rain-fall in the rainy season. There is no way to introduce the Green Revolution in the arid regions with almost no rain, or the semi-arid regions. Therefore, it can be said that those areas may never have had a chance to benefit from the Green Revolution, even though they are within the same country or within Asia.
It is said that even in areas which have a good water supply, back in the 1960's when the Green Revolution just started, for economic reasons and lack of technical knowledge, poverty stricken small-scale farmers couldn't get any fertilizers or modem seed varieties easily. On the other hand, large-scale farmers with financial clout and know-how positively accepted the Green Revolution, resulting in some farmers within the same village benefiting while others did not, so some asserted that the Green Revolution caused social inequality in rural areas by increasing the difference in economic strengths of some farmers.
